Year-end rituals for 2020

I do quite a few things around the end of the calendar year, at this point. What can I say -- the unexamined life is not worth living, though it's also true that the unlived life is not worth examining. Current rituals:

• Written retrospective for my own eyes only, covering a brief summary of the year along with the good, the bad and the ugly (different list titles every year, as needed) and some firsts and whatever the hell I feel like writing, with honesty turned up to 11. Usually 3 or 4 pages.


• Publish a video of training clips from the year, on YouTube. Basically a highlight reel.


• Make a new sheet of cardstock to track my physical maintenance of a few strength/flexibility things.


• (After Jan 1) get my total financial spending for the year, do a few calculations related to retirement. Squint, nod soberly.

ALL of the above are coming out weird this year. I've written the retrospective and, now that I have already penned this paragraph in full privacy, feel no concern about plagiarizing and publishing it now:

I’m sitting by the fireplace in our condo at [address], early in the morning, with [cats] searching around for breakfast, knowing I can’t cover this year with the usual dispassionate sweep. It was one for the history books, it was a dumpster fire, it was an eye-gouging level of WTF; it was widely blamed, personified and vilified like no year I’ve ever seen. It was a “reset year” for me, like 2012 or like 1999, in which my life crumbled and burned and rested, and eventually started sending tiny green shoots out into the ash -- but this time it was that for a whole lot of other people as well, and potentially for the country, and certainly in some ways for the world. I am a sensitive, trembling newborn in a world that has learned empathy, and I am a jaded bitch who can now definitely handle anything. It’s complicated.

It's. Fucking. Complicated. You bitch of a year. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.